Seret

That's a lot of struts.

I do it once I've zeroed out all relative velocity, before the approaching ship starts its approach (or maybe after if I'm feeling frisky). Quick switch, set "control from here" on a port, go to map and target the approaching ship, then rotate onto the pink on the navball. Easy peasy. Obviously not advisable if you're a launch-straight-to-rendezvous kind of player

Ideally yes. If the market stagnated or contracted some players would go to the wall, some would stay in business. C'est la vie. There will still be a market for sat launch in the future. There's definitely value in Earth observation and satellite comms.

I still think helicopter+legs might be a goer. A vehicle that was a bit slow and clunky under it's own power might not be so bad if it was coupled to a helicopter that could rapidly put it where it was needed. It'd limit the upper weight quite a bit, it might be worth taking the man out and making it semi-autonomous to save on volume under armour. The crew operating it could even stay in the helicopter.

I voted yes, but I have used standardised rockets before. Generally however I just find it easier to build the payload, then slap enough rocket parts underneath it for the ÃŽâ€v to hit my target. I tend to be a bit minimalist, I don't like adding any more parts than I strictly need. Having said that I do find myself applying tried-and-tested combinations of parts a lot, even if they aren't exactly the same launcher.

Sure, it's a lot quicker and simpler to just turn the station though. Why make life any harder for yourself than it needs to be? I always turn my docking target to face the approaching ship.

Even if the number of satellites in use stays constant we'd still need to be launching new ones on a regular basis. They don't last forever. Satellite launch is the one part of the space industry that you can rely on to stay profitable in the future.

Not to mention a damn sight quieter and can be trained to lie down. DARPA's remit is blue-sky thinking. Their job is to throw 100 crazy ideas at the wall, and if one sticks that's great. They aren't necessarily investigating anything the various branches of the US forces have expressed a need for. Cost isn't an issue, legs wouldn't be significantly more expensive than wheels or tracks. The issue is that legs are inherently unstable, are more complicated, and don't have 100 years of automotive experience behind them to ensure reliability. On a combat vehicle they'd also be quite vulnerable, as to keep efficiency up you'd want them to have a very minimal amount of armour on them. When you weigh up the pros and cons there really aren't a lot of reasons to put legs on things. It's not a really a materials problem, it's a control one. Walking is an inherently unstable system, you need really good control systems for it to work. I'd say we're nowhere near the point where the added complexity is outweighed by any benefits. Power supply is a huge issue for current walking robots, they suck a lot of fuel to get very mediocre performance. A one-man ground combat vehicle is pretty unlikely any time soon, even the lightest have a minimum of a two-man crew. Having to drive, operate weapons, acquire targets, communicate and maintain the vehicle is too much for one man. Nope, fire control on modern AFVs would have no problem at all with that. A walker is going to be slower than pretty much everything else on the battlefield. The ability to also walk across a small subset of terrain that might be inaccessible to wheeled vehicles (but probably not most tracked ones) isn't a major mobility advantage IMO. I disagree about urban, our cities are designed for wheeled vehicles with far less mobility than AFVs. The reason AFVs don't like fighting in urban areas is because engagement ranges are short, there's tons of cover for infantry, and they're at risk from top attack/off route mines/various other nasties. A walking vehicle would face the exact same risks, so wouldn't really be an improvement. As for jungles/woods, I think you'd find a tall vehicle would actually struggle a lot of the time. Sure you can. But would this actually be able to outperform current tank hunting teams? An ATGM team in a softskin or MRAP would be faster when mounted, and much more survivable when they dismounted to go hunting. Even if you hypothetical mini-mech was agile enough to be able to lie down and get up it'd still be harder to conceal than two guys with an ATGM firing post.

Because the Alcubierre metric, as a purely mathematical construct, can be made to work by including stuff which isn't necessarily real. Just because the sums work doesn't mean that it'll work that way in reality. Just look at Einstein's famous cosmological constant; he included it to make the maths work the way he thought it should. It turns out reality is different. Experiment disproves mathematical models all the time (in fact that's the whole point...) Now I'm not saying negative mass isn't real, just that it isn't necessarily real just because Alcubierre's idea requires it, which seems to be what you're suggesting.

No, we don't know that it works. It relies on unknown physics.

Correct. It would also embody a lot of untried technology, so even once they did have a prototype development would probably be quite conservative. Bottom line: don't hold your breath. There are a lot of hurdles to clear before a commercial Skylon flies.

Nobody as far as I can see. The point folks are making is that a deal on that scale would have been announced. It's not like Skylon is going to pop into existence as some kind of surprise in the next few years. We'd hear about it if development was ramping up. At the moment all we're hearing out of REL is continued Sabre development.

For sure, but it's a big project. If REL wanted to stay small it would mean contracting out a lot of the heavy lifting. Nobody's suggesting that small companies can't be effective in aerospace, just that making a whole new spacecraft on the scale of the Skylon isn't a job a small outfit could handle without a lot of help.

I've not noticed a big difference. You'd need to actually do some comparative testing, as I suspect it would affect some parts of the gameplay and not others. The bottom line though is that almost everybody has 64-bit hardware, so by rights we should all be running 64-bit software. Unfortunately the Windows ecosystem is really, really holding back the transition.

Not self-sustaining I'm afraid. All the systems looking to be flown in the next few years are open loop, like what you currently have on the ISS.

Awsumindyman, I'm aware of the principle of how the Alcubierre metric works. The problem is that it relies on a type of energy that has never been proven to exist. It's not quite the same as saying we'll run it on unicorn p*ss, but it's close.

I agree, the Linux 64-bit version of it works well. The problem isn't at Squad's end, they've already got 64-bit KSP working fine.

It would stop spinning every time the station went "on rails" (ie: you switched to another ship not in the vicinity of the station). So you would need to spin it up every time you rendezvoused for docking. That's a limitation of the game unfortunately.

Well, then let's take the opinion out of it. What do we know for certain? REL are a small company with no significant production capability themselves. They are essentially an R&D outfit, and would need to contract out any major production work. The senior people at REL have been trying to build a spaceplane for many years. The UK government and ESA have funded work on the Sabre engine. No Sabre engines have been built, but major subassemblies have been tested. Skylon is currently unfunded, the funding agreement with the British National Space Centre, ESA and REL is for Sabre development, not Skylon. ESA rejected the Skylon design for their New European Launch Services project. So what you have is an R&D company who are more than 90% privately funded, and don't have a lot of resources themselves (compared to a major player like Lockheed or Boeing). Companies like that live on publicity, so you can be pretty sure that the actual state of development will be reasonably well covered in the media. Sabre development is progressing well, but they're still in the testing phase. There have been no prototypes, ground testing or flight tests yet and these things do take years. Actual production Sabre engines are still some way away. Skylon is at a much earlier stage of development, it is only a paper aeroplane at this stage. It's development will depend largely on whether the Sabre project is successful.

You won't even get Sabre this year, Skylon would be at least a decade behind that. There's no funding for Skylon yet, that will only come once they've proved Sabre works.

/thread If someone handed me the opportunity to get stupidly rich while making the world a better place, I wouldn't have think very hard about it.

Look, if legs offered any kind of mobility advantage over tracks that was worth it, we'd be using them already. Absolutely. Assuming a mech would be used to directly fight the enemy (rather than in a transport or logistics role) one of the main problems for operating alongside infantry would be its profile. A weapon system that stuck out like the dog's proverbials wouldn't be much use, as it would just get you shelled. A mech would have to be as low profile as possible, so you'd be looking at some kind of spider planform that could get down low and be concealed. Height is absolutely the last thing you'd want.

What point are you trying to make? Where have I said that a warp drive would be useless? I've said the exact opposite in fact: that even though it's unlikely to be possible, it would be so useful that it warrants investigation.

It's about 7rpm. Try it though, that's pretty fast for a large structure. You're talking about 13ms-1 of tangential velocity on the far ends, that's 48kmh-1.

Technically no: Building Antenna Span Earth It's named after the stuff they jump off. Jumping from orbit would just be a really epic parachute jump.